Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett

by James Knowlson

  My most poignant memories of Sam Beckett relate of course to those final few months of his life when I visited him every week in the old people’s home to interview him for my biography. He was frailer, moving less easily across the room as he went to get the five-o’-clock Jameson or Bushmill’s whiskey, which I liked no more then than I had nineteen years before. The oxygen cylinder propped up against the wall was a keen reminder of the emphysema from which he was suffering. Mentally, too, he was less agile, less sure of finding the right words, although, as the interviews published earlier in this book reveal, he usually found them in the end. His wife, Suzanne, died in July only three weeks after we had started our interviews. Yet he called me the day after her funeral to ask when we were going to resume our talks.

  Perhaps even more than in previous years when he had been in better health, I was impressed in those final months by the traits that lay behind his genius. He had not focused on himself to the exclusion of others, as so many old people do. He stayed almost as involved in the world as he had always been, still reading, still observing, still asking questions. You were constantly aware that you were with one of the best-read writers of the century, who had absorbed what others had expressed and made it his own. And yet, alongside his intellectualism, I was even more conscious of the deep veins of feeling that he had so often tapped in his work. As we talked about his life, experiences that had touched him most deeply emerged with startling clarity: his deep love for his mother, with whom it is known he had such a difficult relationship, and about whom he could scarcely bring himself to talk; the guilt he experienced at letting his father down by quitting his academic post and the pain that returned sharply as he talked of his father’s death; the huge debt he felt towards Suzanne, who had believed in his writing when all the French publishers had been turning him down. The sensitivity to pain and suffering that had always been a key element in his writing now seemed more starkly exposed. I felt how much his sensitivity, even his vulnerability were preconditions of his creative endeavour. And as we sat in his modest, austere, little room, I often thought of an earlier remark he had made that he was ‘all feeling’. It made perfect sense.

  S. E. Gontarski

  S. E. Gontarski is Sarah Herndon Professor of English at Florida State University, where he teaches courses in twentieth-century Irish Studies, in British, US and European Modernism, and in drama and performance theory. His theatrical work includes guest directorships at the Los Angeles Actors’ Theater, the Magic Theater in San Francisco and the Teatros del Circulo in Madrid. He is the author or editor of numerous books, most recently The Grove Press Reader, 1951-2001 (2001), and The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought (with C. J. Ackerley) (2004). Contribution written especially for this volume.

  Beckett in Performance

  Paris, 4 November 1984. Nothing to be done. Technicians drop lights; microphones and speakers crackle; the huge black box in which the play’s unnamed character will appear squeaks noisily as it lurches across the stage in spasms. The ‘machine’, as the crew calls it, was designed as an invisible frame, to mask the source of theatrical light and to subvert the audience’s faith in its own perception. Within this black box, Pierre Dux (an institution in the French theatre), dressed in a black, neck-high cassock, will sit on the black chair, and the ‘machine’ will move his speaking head imperceptibly across the stage. At some point during the performance the audience will suddenly discern that the head has moved, although no movement, no sound, no change in the intensity or source of light is perceptible. The ‘machine’ is an ingenious contraption which swallows up the corporeality of the actor, as well as two-thirds of the production budget. But it should create some stunning theatrical effects: a levitated, speaking head, illuminated by a source-less light.

  It is one week before the announced opening of Compagnie. Everyone knows that Beckett is to attend the afternoon run-through, and nothing is ready. He had come to earlier rehearsals, had discussed this adaptation of his novella with the director, Pierre Chabert, and the actor, Pierre Dux, over coffee and whiskey, but he has not returned for three weeks. Even I (who have been watching rehearsals as a disinterested party in preparation for directing the English-language première at what was then the Los Angeles Actors’ Theater) am nervous.

  Beckett arrives precisely at four o’clock at the back of the Petite Salle of the Jean-Louis Barrault/Madeleine Renaud Théâtre du Rond-Point, pulls a copy of Compagnie from the pocket of his greatcoat, and sits inconspicuously at the makeshift desk at the back of the theatre. He exchanges a few words with Chabert, who then mutters into his headset and turns on the masked reading lamp as the house lights begin to fade. With his wire-rimmed glasses perched on his forehead, Beckett follows the text with his finger, his nose nearly touching the page.

  The run-through is flawless, but eerie. The lights fade and come up to total silence. It is theatre in a vacuum, a ghost performance, the only kind Beckett attends. Beckett sits silently with his head bowed, rubbing thumb and forefinger so deeply into his eyes that his sockets seem to be as empty as those of Rodin’s Balzac. He is massaging his brain directly. Still no comment. He rises and begins to make his way towards the stage, but his eyes, failing him regularly now at seventy-eight, are slow to adjust to the light change, and he stumbles on the stairs. He recovers, moves to the edge of the stage and stares at the floor. Silence. Finally, hesitantly: perhaps the narrative cannot be staged at all. Four weeks into rehearsals, opening night is a week away. It is entirely my fault for consenting to the adaptation. It is too complicated, too theatrical. Beckett had been reluctant to attend rehearsals from the first. It was, after all, Chabert’s production. Chabert persisted, and persisting, incurred obligations.

  Beckett’s theatrical vision is unsparing: making concessions to audience, friendship, or even finally self is an alien notion. Theatre, like politics, is an art of compromise, but somehow Beckett has failed to make any and has succeeded none the less. He has somehow resisted the collaborative nature of theatrical production. (I once asked Ruby Cohn to referee a grant application that I made to work in Paris with Beckett on an adaptation of his prose work First Love. I used the word ‘collaborate’ in my application, meaning simply ‘to work with’; she snapped back, ‘No one collaborates with Beckett.’ In a very real sense she was right; somehow the word is inappropriate when one works with Beckett.)

  Perhaps, if the character is fully lit and his costume simplified, Beckett resumes, looking down at the floor - just a bathrobe, say. Perhaps, if the ‘machine’ is discarded. Perhaps, if Pierre Dux’s moving lips could be masked during the second-person, listening phase of the narrative. Perhaps, if Dux were surprised by the second-person voice, which he speaks but which is amplified through speakers at the rear of the theatre. Dux ought not to anticipate the voice. So he must begin speaking with his head still bowed and raise it to search out the source of the sound. There is no insistence; the suggestions are almost whispered. The cast and director, eager for an imprimatur, agree (as does the visiting American director). In good spirits despite a substantial re-staging a week before opening, the cast and crew withdraw to the dining room for drinks. Pierre Dux is buying, so we follow his lead, with Scotch all around. Everyone relaxes. They at least have a show! Beckett buys a second round and leaves.

  The following morning I meet Beckett at the pricey, tourist PLM hotel that he favours for its convenience to his boulevard St Jacques flat and we discuss changes for the American production. Why aren’t the second-person narratives taped, I ask? That would be preferable, Beckett responds. Should the American text follow the cuts in the French text exactly (I want to restore some of the deleted material)? Not necessarily, he says. He is unusually forthcoming today and is obviously trying to leave me some working room. ‘What is the relationship between the two voices?’ I ask. The third-person voice, he explains, is ‘erecting a series of hypotheses, each of which is false’. The second-person voice is �
�trying to create a history, a past for the third person’. We have spent an hour over one double express, and I have gathered enough clues for my staging. But would it be my staging of Beckett’s play? Working with Beckett forces one to rethink the whole nature of the genre. Where is the theatre work, anyway? Whose work is it? It’s Beckett’s text, but whose theatre work?

  In April of 1986 I was back in Paris, preparing to stage another play. The previous summer, Beckett had been in Germany, directing a television version of his play What Where. In the process he had rewritten the text, filmed it and offered the rewritten version to Pierre Chabert to stage in Paris. I was offered the English version and would as usual attend Paris rehearsals in preparation for the American staging. Beckett was again preoccupied with simplifying the visual imagery and his dialogue. In the original stage version, the voice of Bam was represented by a hanging megaphone. For his television version, he substituted an enlarged, diffuse image of a face. Such an oversized face was not possible on the stage, according to Chabert - at least at short notice - so Beckett suggested just the outline of a skull, a ring of diffuse light, an image with almost angelic overtones. Again we met after rehearsals, this time in the deserted restaurant of the Théâtre du Rond-Point. I suggested that I thought I could create a hologram to serve as the image of Bam. That was preferable, he suggested. Could we not restore the ‘mime’ as well, the wordless pattern of appearance and disappearance early in the play? The Paris version seemed to be over-cut. Yes, of course, if I wished, he said.

  I staged the revised What Where at the Magic Theater in San Francisco in Visions of Beckett: A Quartet of One-Acts, and it was filmed for television by John Reilly of Global Village, who then took the tape to Paris to show Beckett. This would be the first production of mine that Beckett would actually see. He had of course seen photographs, listened to audio tapes and the like, but that was all. He watched Rough for Theatre I, as he later disclosed, for the first time, ever, and watched my production of Ohio Impromptu, and then What Where, about which he had most to say. Yes, yes, Beckett said, that’s fine … but perhaps the lips could move when Bam speaks. And perhaps the other characters, Bim, Bem, and Bom, could be positioned differently. John Reilly, who was producing the piece for Global Village, returned to New York, and, through the magic of computerized editing, repositioned the images according to Beckett’s instructions. He hired another actor, filmed his lips miming the dialogue, and electronically grafted those lips onto the computer-created face of Bam. Then he brought the videotape back to Beckett. Yes, yes, Beckett said, that’s fine … but perhaps Bam’s voice could have less echo. And so John returned to San Francisco to re-tape the voice with me and actor Tom Luce. To be safe we taped several versions of the dialogue and so brought Beckett several choices.

  In 1989, I staged a revised script of Endgame, again at the Magic Theater. I had just revised the play myself for Faber and Faber, incorporating Beckett’s cuts and additions for two productions he directed: one in German at the Schiller-Theater Werkstatt in 1967 and one in English with the San Quentin Drama Workshop at the Riverside Studios, London, in May of 1980. I sent Beckett the revised and fully annotated text of Endgame, and he reviewed and approved the changes and made a few additional emendations to the text and to my annotations, marking the more elaborate explanations in my footnotes with a huge ‘X’, which symbol he had established early to mean ‘not intended’. I felt that I was approaching rehearsals with more information than the average director. I had spent, for example, two weeks watching Beckett direct the San Quentin Drama Workshop in London in 1980, and had just studied, translated and annotated Beckett’s Schiller Regiebuch and his notes to the San Quentin production. I had also established a new text for Endgame based on Beckett’s directorial changes and sent them to him for his approval. I was as prepared as I could ever hope to be for rehearsals, and I began knowing more about how Beckett conceives the staging of this play than I could have known about the work of any other playwright, including Brecht, whose notebooks for the Berliner Ensemble were almost as meticulous. I had done most of my work, however, without the actor. Ronnie Davis, who played Clov, had his own ideas about revisions, Beckett’s and his own. Why shouldn’t Clov be blind and walk on all fours? If he’s mentally unstable why shouldn’t he periodically bang his head against the walls of the bunker, preferably in the midst of Hamm’s monologues? Why can’t we reintroduce scenes that Beckett cut? Why shouldn’t the play represent the political realities of the period of its composition, the Algerian and Indo-Chinese crises, for instance?

  The glib answer to these questions was that we were performing the play that Beckett wrote and then rewrote in productions. But the questions were not frivolous, or rather were not all frivolous. They represent a search for the art of the actor in Beckett’s theatre. When Beckett is done paring down his minimalist texts, how much creative space remains for other artists: actors, designers, and director? Or is there only a single artist in Beckett’s theatre? Beckett’s contributions to theatrical performance have been extraordinary. He has shorn the theatre of theatricality, reintroduced metaphysics and indeterminacy into the confident, plastic art of theatre and reasserted the primacy of language, of narrative and poetry, of the playwright himself, even as the capacities of writer and narrative are simultaneously diminished and subverted. In a letter to his American publisher, Barney Rosset, Beckett expresses his diminished authority:

  … had a highly unsatisfactory interview with SIR Ralph Richardson who wanted the low-down on Pozzo, his home address and curriculumvitae, and seemed to make the forthcoming of this and similar information the condition of his condescending to illustrate the part of Pozzo. Too tired to give satisfaction. I told him that all I knew about Pozzo was in the text, that if I had known more I would have put it in the text, and that this was true also of the other characters which I trust puts an end to that star.

  Similarly, in rehearsals for Endgame in London in 1980, Rick Cluchey, who was playing Hamm, asked Beckett directly if the little boy in Hamm’s narrative is actually the young Clov. ‘Don’t know if the little boy is the young Clov, Rick’, Beckett responded, ‘simply don’t know.’

  Beckett has both extended the primacy of the playwright, and so authorial power, to an unprecedented extent, while simultaneously proclaiming authorial impotence, a diminished authority. That creates an ideological and aesthetic vacuum, which many a director and actor are all too willing to fill. It is a vacuum, however, that Beckett expects no one to fill, that, in fact, defines Beckettian performance, separates it from that of others. If actor or director fills that space, Beckett becomes Ibsen.

  Charles Krance

  Charles Krance (1937-) was Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. The author of L.-F. Céline: The l of the Storm (French Forum Monographs, No. 75), Nicholasville, KY, 1992, he also edited bilingual manuscript studies of Beckett’s Company, A Piece of Monologue and Mal vu mal dit(lll Seen Ill Said), New York, Garland Press, 1993; 1996. Contribution is a revised version of Krance’s memories set down shortly after his meeting with Beckett.

  Meeting with Beckett, 1 September 1986. Our appointment was for II a.m. at the PLM Hôtel St Jacques, 17 boulevard St Jacques.

  At 10.58, I entered the PLM from the main entrance into the lobby, busy with rich American tourists planning their day. Not seeing Beckett, I stood to one side and waited. At precisely 11.00, Beckett descended the four carpeted stairs into the lobby. There was no mistaking him for anyone else with his elegant stance, determined, though relaxed, stride and noble head slightly bowed with a hint of undisguised vulnerability. He was wearing a café-au-lait camel-hair jacket, rust-coloured turtle-neck sweater and light-grey flannels. I walked towards him and we met a few paces in front of the stairs. Beckett held out his hand with a gentle ‘Mr Krance’ and I responded in kind, ‘Mr Beckett’. ‘Shall we go up this way?’ he suggested and we headed back up the four stairs and made our way to the Café Français. B
eckett, in the lead, headed towards a rectangular table at the rear. While we traversed the room, several of the people inside nodded and smiled politely at Beckett’s entrance and the waiters, mostly young, greeted him warmly and with knowing respect. Beckett pointed to the seat behind the table. ‘Why don’t you sit there, Mr Krance?’ he suggested and moved to the seat opposite.

  His voice was of a slightly higher and considerably mellower pitch than I had imagined it would be. I was aware of the gentle Irish lilt in his pronunciation. His pronouncing of my name was the most noticeable example, for it sounded like Mr ‘Krentz’, with a slight roll on the ‘r’ and an abbreviated vowel sound. As he spoke and listened, his light-blue eyes glowed with a subtle variety of expressions. He sat comfortably but very straight on his chair, with an occasional lean forward, especially when making a point. Occasionally he would half-swing to the left in a relaxed, but still straight, posture, to puff gently and gracefully on his cigar and momentarily reflect.